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Carly Rae Jepsen, seen performing in Las Vegas, has become probably the best known Canadian Idol alumnus. (DAVID BECKER / GETTY IMAGES)

Eva Avila says she's eternally grateful for Canadian Idol but doesn't want to be labelled an Idol winner for the rest of her life. (E1 ENTERTAINMENT PHOTO)

Jake Gold, Farley Flex, Sass Jordan and Zack Werner judge a Canadian Idol hopeful in 2004. Werner says he bumps into all kinds of people in the music industry these days who auditioned for Idol. (TANNIS TOOHEY / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO)

Season 1 winner Ryan Malcolm is taking a break from making music with his band Low Level Flight. (AARON HARRIS / CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO)

One gifted the world with “Call Me Maybe.” One headlined the Grey Cup halftime show in Regina last weekend. Two more just found out they’re bound for the bright lights of Broadway.

Ten years on from bookish Kingston waiter Ryan Malcolm’s victory at the end of the first season of Canadian Idol, the graduates of CTV’s immensely popular musical talent show are, for the most part, still gainfully employed in the entertainment industry.

True, Canadian Idol never became a non-stop, hit-generating behemoth on the order of American Idol, but in a more modest manner quite in keeping with our retiring national identity the show has seeded the nation’s stages and studios with numerous performers who are doing all right for themselves. (See for yourself on page E9.)

Idol lasted six seasons before CTV put it on hiatus in 2008 — it was never officially cancelled — due to the economic climate of the time. When it launched in 2003, the series averaged more than two million viewers a week, big numbers for a Canadian-made TV show. Even in its final season, it was still drawing more than a million viewers.

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Of course, its American cousin, still a going concern with an upcoming 13th season, pulled close to 40 million viewers at its highest point. That had dropped to 14.3 million by last season’s finale, although American Idol producers like to boast that they’ve produced more music superstars than rival talent shows like The Voice and The X Factor.

On the Canadian side, not all Idol alumni have gone on to become international hit makers like Season 5 runner-up Carly Rae Jepsen, who had the biggest single of 2012 in “Call Me Maybe,” nor do they all have the luxury of playing Canadian arenas and CFL stadiums like Season 2 runner-up Jacob Hoggard and his band Hedley. Most of them are working, though, and not always strictly in the pop-music field.

This Monday, for instance, it will be announced that Season 3 winner Melissa O’Neil and third-place finisher Aaron Walpole — both currently onstage in Les Misérables at the Princess of Wales Theatre — will follow the Cameron Mackintosh production to Broadway once it wraps up its Toronto run on Feb. 2.

(O’Neil and Walpole were keeping mum about their Broadway duties last week, but sources told the Star that O’Neil will understudy the role of Épinone while Walpole will continue subbing for Ramin Karimloo as Jean Valjean once a week, as he’s been doing in Toronto.)

“We were seeing so many people we were bound not to screw it up, to some extent,” opines Zack Werner, who served as the most caustic of Canadian Idol’s four judges during its six-season run. “There are so few places for people who are trying to get a break and we were right at the complete falling-apart of the worldwide musical industry, so all of the traditional places where one would typically go for a record deal had fallen off the face of the earth. So we were in a pretty good spot to get first shot at any number of exceptional people. I bump into all kinds of people who are in bands now all over the place who say, ‘Hey, I auditioned for Idol’ or ‘I was in the Top 50.’

“I was at a show the other night and Irene Torres was playing. Now she’s a great jazz singer, and playing and doing her thing, and out touring all over the place and whatever, and she was, like: ‘You know, I was Top 50 in Season 3.’ I had no idea. They’re everywhere. You just don’t know who they are. We were plowing through a lot of folks. One of the Canadian Tenors made Top 30, too. They’re everywhere.”

Ironically, Canadian Idol was perhaps toughest on its winners, who were granted a major-label contract with Sony/BMG Canada and immediately rushed into recording careers over which they had almost zero control.

“I don’t know if I ever really had a recording career,” laughs O’Neil, 25. “After the finale, you have two weeks and all the songs have already been written and picked, and you go into a recording studio and sing over a bunch of stuff — very much like karaoke on Idol — and then you go on tour with a bunch of songs you just got packaged in with. So I wouldn’t say that was my recording career. I was definitely a part of a machine.”

The Calgary-raised O’Neil released just one album, 2005’s Melissa O’Neil, before opting out of her contract.

She still writes today, she says, although she’s “not at that point yet where I’m ready to share my little brain babies with anyone.” And, frankly, she’s more comfortable in musical theatre.

“I’m more drawn to it than I am a solo career and I think that’s because I had a bad experience with that side of the business,” she says. “Being an insecure teenager and having all these cameras (around) and pictures, that just turned me off the entire thing. I like being a part of a team and working on a show.”

Original Canadian Idol winner Malcolm also went through a period of bitterness “about the record industry as a whole” once the initial rush of victory started to subside and he found himself thrust into recording sessions for his debut album, Home, where he was “singing hip hop with guys who wrote for the Backstreet Boys.”

He’s eternally grateful to the show for the doors it opened for him, he says, and — like all the other ex-Idol cast members interviewed for this piece — has nothing but good things to say about the crew. But while “the first couple of years after the show were great to me,” Malcolm soon found the Canadian Idol tag a bit of an albatross around his neck.

In the end, he decided it was best to disappear into a band, the alt-rock combo Low Level Flight, and restart his career without the Idol baggage.

“I was a little naive and as an artist I was just beginning,” says Malcolm, 34, who is currently “retiring for a couple of years” and opening a restaurant at a bed-and-breakfast in Costa Rica after several years of extensive roadwork with Low Level Flight. “I’d been singing my whole life, but nothing like I was about to start doing. And I knew the album wasn’t — what’s the right word without offending some of the people involved? — it wasn’t exactly my best material, let’s put it that way.

“In the end, the album sold well, but I don’t look at that as a success for me. For me, success is having toured the world with Low Level Flight and having tracks in the Top 10 here and in Asia and Europe, and we did that. There wasn’t a label behind that, it was us, just five guys hunkering down in a studio in Brooklyn working with people we cherry-picked because we knew they were great and we knew what we wanted to do, as opposed to having a huge, huge machine behind you with millions of dollars and you’re just sitting there going: ‘OK, I’ll bend over at your request, sure.’”

Canadian Idol was “the perfect platform for me to transition from doing music as a hobby to doing it as a profession,” says the 26-year-old Gatineau native. After releasing a pair of post-Idol albums with Sony/BMG, 2006’s Somewhere Else and 2008’s Give Me the Music, however, she took a five-year break from recording that she hopes will distance her forthcoming indie EP, Dream You Better, from the brand.

“I would like one day to be known as Eva Avila, singer/songwriter/artist/actress/whatever and not necessarily be known as the girl from Canadian Idol all the time,” she says. “Look at Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood. They’re not necessarily associated with American Idol anymore because they’ve made a name for themselves, they’ve really made their place in the industry. So that’s what I’m hoping for one day.

“I’ll be eternally grateful for it. But then again, I’ll repeat: I hope I’m not labelled as a Canadian Idol winner for the rest of my life.”

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